There are only three weeks left until Forrester’s Marketing Forum, and the excitement surrounding this event is growing exponentially. Our focus this year is on how companies must radically shift their marketing practices to account for the myriad of new methods and media that people use to engage with a company and its brands and products. Our goal is to help you learn how to adjust to this new digital world we call the Splinternet.

In classic Forrester style, we run our presentation tracks to cater to each of the roles we serve within the marketing and strategy organization. For the market insights (MI) professional track, my colleagues Tamara Barber and Jackie Anderson have prepared some great content, starting first with Tamara’s take on the future of the MI department and then shifting to the awesome panel of speakers Jackie has lined up on what youth research can teach us about 21st century market insights. Next up for our track, I will walk you through some cool, emerging, and innovative research methodologies that you can use to understand this new type of customer.

This is an exciting topic that I can talk about for hours! But I only have a limited amount of time so I will be focusing on three methodologies that I think have a lot of promise — prediction markets, neuroscience, and gamification. The overall theme of my talk is not about how these methodologies will replace traditional research methods but rather how these techniques can shed light on the customer in a way that we haven’t been able to do and thus help us get closer to understanding the essence of what makes a customer tick. During the session I will walk you through how each of these methodologies works, provide some great case study examples, and talk about what steps you need to do to “sell” this into the organization. I hope that you will leave this session clamoring to get your hands dirty and start using these methods.

On a side note, if you want to get your hands dirty immediately on these innovative methodologies, I recommend that you register for our Market Insights FLB council meeting that will be held the day before the Marketing Forum, Monday, April 4. During the meeting we will actually be running a prediction market and a neuroscience study in person so you can get a feel for exactly how these studies are conducted and how the data is analyzed and interpreted. Cool, right? If you are a market insights FLB member and haven’t registered or if you are interested in understanding more about our FLB council, please contact Amy Chernov.